


dig up the bones

by callunavulgari



Series: Dark Month Collection [50]
Category: American Horror Story, Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Childhood Sexual Abuse, M/M, Non-Graphic Rape/Non-Con, Parent/Child Incest, Rape Recovery, Recreational Drug Use, Sexual Abuse, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-26
Updated: 2013-10-26
Packaged: 2017-12-30 13:56:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1019426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/callunavulgari/pseuds/callunavulgari
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Amazing how you don’t even notice the monsters creeping into bed with you when they take the form of someone you love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	dig up the bones

**Author's Note:**

> Dark Month, Day 26. The prompt was: "The monsters can crawl under the blankets with you, so what's the use of hiding?" I'm not gonna lie, originally this prompt was gonna be a Nico/Percy fusion of the movie The Grudge, but I saw last week's episode of Coven and couldn't resist. Chances are that these are going to be a series of interconnected fics for the various characters in Coven. This does deal with the non-graphic childhood sexual abuse between a parent and a child. If this is going to mess with you, don't read it.

Axel remembers a time when his life wasn’t such complete and utter bullshit. He remembers his dad in snatches of scent-touch-taste—the smell of a freshly lit cigar in the early hours of the morning; the feel of callused, time-worn hands wrapped tight around his, guiding the bike while giving Axel the illusion that he was the one keeping himself from face planting in the dirt; the taste of pork chops for dinner with a side of applesauce and lima beans, same as his Mama made him.  
  
Back then, Reno had still been around too—the big brother that Axel looked up to until he realized what a shit Reno really was.  
  
When his dad left, things were okay for a while. His mom was a wreck, but Reno was fifteen—old enough that none of the old guys from the car shop down the street batted a lash when he showed up asking for work.  
  
He had three years of relative happiness before Reno left and his mom started looking to him for help. _It’s your job now_ , she’d whispered, her voice cloyingly sweet. _Your job to be the man of the house_.  
  
He’d stepped up, went to the same guys that Reno had before, and even though he was a scrawny fourteen, they gave him sympathetic looks and paid him five bucks an hour under the table—every day after school, all day on the weekends.  
  
The abuse didn’t start up at first. Now, he looks back on it and realizes that his mother was probably waiting for Reno to come back. Years down the road and the tremble of Reno’s lip in the dusky hours of twilight, when he’d come home from work suddenly makes sense.  
  
He still remembers the first day that she’d crept into his room at night—how he’d rubbed the sleep dusty corners of his eyes and squinted at her silhouette, suspended in a beam of light creeping in from the hallway. How he’d asked, his voice creaking like a rusty see-saw, _Mama_?  
  
The shame was the worst part. He was fourteen years old and had never so much as looked at a girl, not yet, that first time she put her hands on him, her hand creeping into his underwear as she soothed him with cobwebbed words. _It’s okay, baby. Mama loves you._  
  
He thought it was his fault. He thought that he was wrong.  
  
It wasn’t until he got out, got his ass off to college that he realized: it wasn’t _him_ who was wrong, it was _her_.  
  
Amazing how you don’t even notice the monsters creeping into bed with you when they take the form of someone you love.  
  
.  
  
College wasn’t necessarily fun, but it came with a sense of freedom. He could drink himself into stupors, blaze up and snort whatever the fuck he wanted, and no one could stop him. It was powerful—it was amazing.  
  
He got himself into a fraternity and that was okay too. He didn’t think much of his brothers, but he didn’t really need to. When they found out he was gay—because that wasn’t so much a realization as it was an epiphany, tugging a boy in by his lapels and not feeling sickness curl in his gut—they kind of shrugged at him and instead of bringing him chicks to flirt with, they brought him dudes.  
  
He didn’t go home for Thanksgiving or Christmas if he could help it, just vegged out in the almost empty dorm.  
  
His mom visited him once at the dorm. When his roommate saw the fear in his eyes, his brothers closed ranks around him—didn’t let her near him the entire time. It was subtle, cleverer than the drunken assholes who hollered on the lawn every night, their eyes flinty and dark as they made small talk.  
  
She tried for a hug before she left, startling a little when Demyx intercepted her flawlessly.  
  
They didn’t say anything about it, but when he muffled his sobs into his sheets that night, Demyx had silently lobbed a box of kleenex at his head, and he’d smiled through the tears. Just a bit.  
  
.  
  
He meets Roxas that October and he’s stone-cold sober, has to be, to keep his boys under control.  
  
He’s chatting with one of his buddies when he sees this tiny wisp of a thing drift in through the door—blonde hair, blue eyes, and a look that simultaneously screams ‘don’t fuck with me’ and ‘please god help me.’  
  
It’s a look that Axel’s familiar with. He sees it every day in the mirror.  
  
He watches the kid lose his friend in the crowd and Axel doesn’t pay attention to her too much because he’s watching the kid slip through a sea of faces. He’s not really dressed for a party, but other than his jacket, Axel’s not either.  
  
Then he meets the kid—Roxas—who has this fractured, guarded smile—faintly crooked, like its hanging on strings.  
  
 _Is that your superpower?_ Roxas asks him, digging in his pocket for his cigarettes and never breaking eye contact with Axel, not once.  
  
Chemistry doesn’t happen with him often. Axel likes sex; likes to yank somebody up close to him and taste their skin, their lips, their spunk—likes the way that with sex, there’s always something that you can tell about someone that you wouldn’t have known otherwise. He likes the closeness, the intimacy of the act—his mom hasn’t ruined that for him, because he won’t let her. There are times that he freezes up, flashbacks of his old room clawing through his head, scrabbling for purchase, but he tries not to let it touch him.  
  
So attraction—that happens often enough, as easy as a quirk of the lips and the feel of a hand curling around his bicep—but chemistry is something wholly different. He’s never looked at someone before and thought, _I want to grow old with him. I want to see how his knobby ankles look in my sheets and taste the stale morning-breath in his kiss._  
  
With Roxas, it’s immediate and visceral, steals his breath away and makes him gasp from the intensity.  
  
In the space of three minutes, he’ll regret it, a little bit, because while he was meeting the love of his life his boys—his _brothers_ —were fucking some poor girl who had drugs on her tongue and helplessness curdling her blood. It won’t matter that they once protected him from a monster with his mother’s face, because he knows first hand what it feels like to feel helpless, and this time, _they’re_ the monsters.  
  
Three minutes is all it takes.  
  
Three minutes between finding the girl trembling with one of his boys between her thighs and getting knocked unconscious on a bus doomed to go up in flames.  
  
He wasn’t even awake when he died.  
  
Where’s the fun in that?  
  
.  
  
The thing is, he’d woken up. Beat a morgue attendant to death with limbs that weren’t his own, his tongue heavy and dead in his mouth. But Roxas was there—Roxas, the boy who should have been his—and it was Roxas who dragged him away to some lonely swamp witch who pasted all the wrong pieces back together, like gluing a jigsaw together that didn’t quite fit.  
  
The witch wasn’t too bad. She was lonely and kind of crazy, but she told him stories that were probably all brought on by acid-trips and held him when he cried.  
  
Then Roxas came back to him and it was like a breath of fresh air gusting through a room he hadn’t realized was stifling. Roxas peered at him as the bayou witch watched them both and Axel still didn’t have a very good grasp on actually using his new, stitched together limbs, but he held himself very still and let him stroke a hand through Roxas’ hair.  
  
 _I have to take him home,_ Roxas had told the bayou witch, his eyes pleading, and the words hadn’t really registered, the same way that Axel hadn’t noticed his boys slipping out after that girl, because he was too busy concentrating on the feel of Roxas holding him propped up.  
  
Roxas takes him home. He leaves Axel there and Axel can’t scream because it hurts—his throat still tastes like formaldehyde and whatever other chemicals they’d doused his body in—his voice box is stringy and almost useless, and when his mother gathers him close, sobbing from happiness, he shoots a helpless, terrified glance to the place Roxas is hiding, crouched behind the old tree that his dad once tied a tire swing to.  
  
 _Don’t leave me_ , he wants to shout. _Not with her._  
  
.  
  
She doesn’t scream, when he finally breaks and beats her head in with a trophy he’d won in the fourth grade.  
  
His mother doesn’t scream, because she doesn’t have time to.  
  
Axel doesn’t scream because he’d torn his vocal cords on that first shout.  
  
Roxas screams enough for both of them.  
  



End file.
